12A. Eyes Closed, Continuing

• Be still exactly where you are. Don't move. Anything.... Take your time and open you eyes. .. . Don't move anything else. .. . Now slowly, very slowly, come to standing and begin a very slow walk in the room.... As you walk, bring your attention back into this room. Notice the others.... Pick up speed, go little faster. Feel each other. Look at each other. Be here.

Again, as in Day Five, we move fairly rapidly from inner focus to outer. No lingering. Nothing terribly important one place or the other. Lets talk.

12B. Nonstop Talk/Walk

• Walk. As you're walking, avoid circling. Change your direction arbitrarily every once in a while. I'd like you to be talking constantly, a non-stop stream of consciousness babble. Let one idea take you to your next idea. Listen to yourself. Listen to what you are saying....

• When you pass somebody in the room, and you hear a few words, or a few phrases out of context, shift your text to accommodate the material that you just heard, and either bring that material into your text, or start a new text, by shifting and beginning new material off of what you just heard.

• Begin to spend some time silently walking and occasionally pause, stand still. Listen to the other voices. Then, relate your walking, the where and when of it, to your talking. Have all of your choices respond to what you're hearing, seeing, feeling, and imagining. Stay with your own content. Avoid blending, responding or using the same language.

• Now, you're working as an ensemble.

This is an exercise in non-functional languaging. Or, at least, nonfunctional in the way we're used to thinking about language. Here, we're not talking to anybody. We're not talking in order to get anything to happen, change anything, or make an effect. We're just talking to talk. To feel the whole feel of talk.

Students enter this with varying degrees of self-consciousness. For example: "I really don't have anything to say, so I'll just repeat myself for a while," or "I'll report some current events that have happened to me lately," or "I'll describe the room," or "How I'm feeling right now, or what the others are wearing," or "I'll comment on what the others are saying," and so on. All of these tactics place the emphasis on what is being said rather than the saying. The experience of talking slips by unnoticed because we get caught in content. The content, or thought, that resulted in the crying example described earlier, blinded the student to the action of crying. The student has prejudged the exercise as difficult and is trying to cope with the problem.

Again and again, students are encouraged to listen to themselves, to really hear not only the content but the structure of what they're saying in detail: the words, parts of words, sounds of their voices, rhythms, the feel of their mouths as it forms language, their chests as they breathe out the words. And to give themselves time. Often they need to slow down, so the imagination can interrupt the habitual, so the onslaught of words and ideas that only recount life can become life.

When the student gives up control, the language languages them, as does the language of the other students. Once they experience language as separate from themselves, something they can dance with and aren't bound to, they hear all language in the same way. Incorporation of others' texts, or shifting their own text in association to what they hear, comes easy; no energy is wasted on a particular outcome, ending, story, logic or reason.